Silicondust HDHomeRun Prime

The HDHomeRun Prime, by Silicondust USA (a wholly owned subsidiary of Silicondust Engineering, New Zealand), is an external HDTV tuner for personal computers. It has three independent tuners, interfaces to the computer via ethernet, and supports a multi-stream CableCARD. Support for this device has been added as of the 0.24 release.

The HDHomeRum Prime is shipping and available now.

What does this get me?

Full support of CableCard requires that every device and software in the recording chain be certified as enforcing the copy protection mandated by the software. For insurmountable technical reasons, MythTV cannot comply with this. Because of this, the HDHomeRun Prime will only allow MythTV access to those shows that are not copy protected. These copy freely shows may be encrypted and inaccessible to a standard QAM tuner, but will be decrypted and made available through the HDHomeRun Prime. These are the same shows that can presently be accessed through firewire capture from a cable box.

It should be noted that while this is a digital tuner, CableCard does not support the kind of access needed by multirec to record multiple shows from a single tuner. This device will only be able to record three shows at a time.